What Birds Do for Us 



Clarence Moores Weed, "while throughout the 

 winter one will destroy an immense number of the 

 eggs of the canker-worm." 



CARETAKERS OF THE GROUND FLOOR 



Hidden in the grasses at the foot of the trees, 

 among the undergrowth of woodland borders, under 

 the carpet of last year's leaves, and buried in the 

 ground itself, are insect enemies whose name is 

 legion. Among "the worst of them are the white 

 grubs — the larvae of May beetles or June bugs — and 

 the wireworms which attack the roots of grasses 

 and the farmers' grain; the maggots of crane-flies 

 which do their fatal work under cover of darkness in 

 the soil ; root- and crown-borers which destroy an- 

 nually fields of timothy, clover, and herds-grass ; 

 grasshoppers, locusts, chinch bugs, cutworms and 

 army worms that have ruined crops enough to pay 

 the national debt many times over. 



But what a hungry feathered army rushes to 

 their attack ! And how much larger would that 

 army have been if, in our blind stupidity or igno- 

 rance, we had not killed off billions of members of it ! 



Some habitual fruit- or seed-eating birds of the 

 trees descend to the ground at certain seasons, or 

 when an insect plague appears, changing their diet 

 to suit nature's special need; others "lay low" the 

 the year around, waging a perpetual insect war. 

 First in that war stands the meadow-lark. It is esti- 

 mated that every meadow-lark is worth over one 

 dollar a year to the farmers, if only in consideration of 

 the grasshoppers it destroys ; and as insects constitute 



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